Marketers need to define which segment of their audience they want to target, then serve content that will enhance their experience.

Once you've created your home page, you need to keep testing to improve conversion.

Landing pages are your opportunity to create a great first impression and to set the expectations of what your visitor will receive. And A/B testing is the way to get those impressions right.

That was the key message from the “Essentials for building relevant, high-converting entry page experiences” session at this week’s Adobe Summit EMEA.

“Landing pages are the most influential step in a customer journey,” said Andrew Hawkins, a consultant at Adobe. “A good landing page defines your brand.”

Marketers need to define which segment of their audience they want to target, then serve content that will enhance their experience, measure and test, Hawkins argued. Then they need to keep testing to improve conversion.

Top Toy, which has 303 retail stores and eight ecommerce sites across seven countries, has been experimenting with different landing pages and targeting options. Anders Beese, traffic manager at Top Toy, said previously a variety of people would have been involved in the decision-making process of website optimisation, with the outcomes being decided either by committee or by the most senior person in the room. Now they test and analyse the data to get optimum results.

To illustrate the point, Beese showed two near-identical product landing pages. The only difference was the “add to basket” button was red on one and blue on the other. He then asked the audience which they thought had worked better. A third of the room chose blue and two-thirds red. The results from testing showed the blue button won convincingly with a 165% uplift.

Beese’s next examples showed how Top Toy uses recommendations, displaying similar items to those the customer is currently viewing. The two examples he shared had achieved uplifts of 117% and 769% against their initial product page design.

“Pages with the recommendation upsell box are ten times more likely to lead to a purchase,” said Beese.